Edmund Cartwright designed and built the first power loom in 1786. The first weaving factory was built four years later in Manchester. Over the next few decades, textile factories rapidly displaced handloom shops because the machines could be operated by unskilled workers at lower wages. There is no question that the handloom weavers (some of whom went on to become the Luddites) were harmed by these developments, in the straightforward sense that they suffered material setbacks to their interests. Inflicting such harms, however, was no part of Cartwright’s intentions, nor the intentions of the factory builders, the capital investors in those factories, the low-wage workers they employed, or textile consumers. Rather, the harms suffered by the displaced handloom weavers were simply an unintended byproduct of thousands of decentralized choices by individual market participants.
In his essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill proposes the famous harm principle, according to which society has no business interfering with personal choices that harm no one else. The harm principle guarantees a wide range of freedom—freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of association and lifestyle choice, and so on. Notice, however, that the principle would not protect the conduct of those whose choices harmed the handloom weavers: on Mill’s argument, it remains an open question whether and to what extent the ordinary operations of the market economy ought to be subject to social regulation. Why permit the freedom to buy, sell, and trade when we know perfectly well that those activities will inevitably, if often unintentionally, generate collateral harms? What rules and boundaries should we place on the exercise of market freedom, and how and to what extent should we aim to mitigate the harms to which that freedom gives rise?
Some books are great because they invent entirely novel ideas or theories. Others are great because they take existing ideas or theories and build on or deepen them. And still others are great because they transform the way we think about familiar ideas or theories we thought we understood already. Eric MacGilvray’s Liberal Freedom: Pluralism, Polarization, and Politics is great in the third of these ways. He recasts not just one, but two big ideas.
First, he wants to change how we think about markets. Many people, myself included, tend to think about markets in terms of the “perfect competition” model familiar from contemporary economic theory—that is, roughly, a trading environment in which participation is voluntary, everyone has complete information, and no one can unilaterally influence prices. Real-world markets are often viewed through the lens of this model: we consider the various ways in which reality departs from those ideal conditions, and the consequences such departures have. MacGilvray says we should instead think about markets in terms of the dilemma sketched here: the market sphere is a deliberately constructed but restricted domain in which we permit people to do as they please despite the collateral harms to which their actions might give rise. We tolerate such harms because the free market is so much more efficient and creative, for example, or because it allows for deeper forms of diversity. Thinking about markets in this way, we more directly appreciate what is at stake in public debates about the shape we should give to the market sphere.
Second, MacGilvray wants to change how we think about liberalism. Many people, myself again included, tend to think about liberalism along the lines of a story sketched by John Rawls: on this story, liberalism emerged out of the traumatic experience of the early-modern religious wars in Europe, initially as a modus vivendi among different confessional communities, but eventually flowering into a positive affirmation of toleration and respect for individuality institutionalized as a system of basic rights. MacGilvray points out, however, that on this story liberalism jumps straight from Locke and Kant to Rawls and Dworkin. This is ironic because the century and a half between these figures was precisely the period in which liberalism was at its most influential, and scored its most significant victories: the influence of liberalism began to wane precisely when Rawls reformulated it as a theory of justice founded on the social contract idea.
MacGilvray argues that we should instead think of liberalism as a tradition organized around a problem – specifically, the problem described at the opening of this review. Liberalism emerged as a political movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because it was at that time that the collapse of the old aristocratic social order and the industrial revolution brought everyone into connection with everyone else, and thus made the dilemma of balancing the benefits of market freedom with its collateral harms unavoidable. One benefit of this approach is that it helps us see how liberals shifted from being strong advocates of market freedom in the nineteenth century to more balanced supporters of the welfare state in the twentieth: on MacGilvray’s telling, this was a perfectly natural evolution in the ongoing attempt to work through the dilemmas posed by the rise of capitalism and democracy.
Now before going any further, it is important for me to caution that the way I have just described Professor MacGilvray’s book does not quite match the work’s self-presentation. Roughly speaking, changing how we conventionally think about markets and the liberal tradition are the subjects of Chapters three and four, respectively. What happens in the previous chapters? Chapter one frames the book as a discussion of two sorts of freedom: market freedom on the one hand, and republican freedom on the other. While libertarians push for the former at the expense of the latter, and republicans for the latter at the expense of the former, MacGilvray argues that liberalism can help us find a way to accommodate both. To assess this claim, we must consider what he means by republican freedom, and that is primarily the subject of the second chapter.
It is evident, I think, that we have rather different views on this point. Following an account proposed by Philip Pettit, MacGilvray characterizes freedom in the republican sense as “fitness to be held responsible” (p. 77). However, on my reading of Pettit, fitness for being held responsible is a general conception of freedom, within which freedom from domination is one aspect. Suppose, for instance, that Andrea is late for a job interview because she is disabled and the elevator is out of service. She should not be held responsible for her lateness: her freedom was vitiated, to use Pettit’s language, but not dominated.
Later in the book, MacGilvray says that on the republican view, “we are free if and to the extent that we are self-governing, in the sense that we have collectively authorized the social conditions under which we act” (p. 166). This is much closer to what many assume the republican conception of freedom to be, but it too is not correct. There was a famous debate in the republican tradition as to whether, in Machiavelli’s language, freedom is better safeguarded by the people or by the elites—whether democratic or aristocratic republics are better. But this debate makes no sense if freedom just is self-government. John Milton, who unlike Machiavelli inclined towards the aristocratic position, was quite clear that freedom can be enjoyed by all under well-ordered republican institutions—even by those Royalists who on his view should be excluded from political participation. What republicans mean by freedom, I would say, is simply not having a master. Working out the details can be complicated, but the basic idea is reasonably intuitive. So understood, republican freedom does not stand in categorical opposition to market freedom: the displaced handloom weavers in England were harmed, but not dominated, by the impersonal operations of the textile market.
Fortunately, our disagreement on this point matters little for the main line of argument he wants to advance, and this brings me to the fifth and final chapter of MacGilvray’s book. There he argues that once we embrace the new way of thinking about liberalism, we can see it as a supple framework for working out our substantive disagreements about the appropriate shape of the market sphere: we should think of liberalism not as a doctrinaire conception of justice, but rather as an ongoing pragmatic project of building a humane society of equals under modern conditions. If one is persuaded by this picture, then republicanism could be seen as a substantive contribution to that project—as one proposal among others for how to reconcile capitalism and democracy. Drawing inspiration from the early-modern republicans, contemporary republicans propose that we let the ideal of freedom from domination be our guide. While impersonal market forces do not themselves dominate anyone, their unfolding consequences can easily generate opportunities for some people to dominate others. When public assistance is meagre and people must either work or starve, for instance, employers may become masters over their employees. Republicans may thus advocate boosting public assistance, strengthening unions, or even expanding workplace democracy. Sometimes, though not always, promoting freedom from domination will entail restricting market freedom. By offering fresh new ways to think about these tensions, MacGilvray’s book helps us see clearly what is really at stake.
